Hard Twist: Yarn, the twelfth annual edition of the Gladstone Hotel’s signature exhibition of textile-based art, invited artists to explore storytelling through fiber—asking them to “spin a tale with thread, but without words.” As one of the most significant annual events in the Canadian textile art community, the exhibition brought together contemporary artists whose practices engage material, memory, and narrative through textile language.
Curated by Helena Frei and Chris Mitchell, with Lukus Toane, Director of Exhibitions at the Gladstone Hotel, and juried by Ketzia Kobrah, Natalia Nekrassova of the Textile Museum of Canada, and Erin Stump of ESP Gallery, Hard Twist 12 positioned textile not only as material, but as a carrier of emotion, silence, and psychological experience.
My installation Growing Numb entered this conversation through suspended fiber forms resembling empty capsules—holding a trapped emotional chrysalis, suspended between protection and confinement. A thin line of fiber attempts to connect; it offers shelter, yet also becomes a boundary, holding the body in place.
The lightness of the material, the tension between what is hidden and what is exposed, and the fading colors suggest a fragile state of emotional suspension. Is there still movement inside? Is it still alive? The work exists in this uncertain space between presence and absence, growth and stillness.
The clustered forms echo the painful repetition of emotional survival—patterns that return, accumulate, and remain suspended in time. Like a cocoon that never fully opens, the installation reflects the experience of numbness as both defense and imprisonment.
Through fiber, thread, and fragile structure, Growing Numb gives physical form to psychological states that are often invisible: dissociation, silence, containment, and the quiet struggle to reconnect with feeling.